The Path Of The Pearl

The Pearl allows you to put your contemplation of the Golden Path into practice. What use is knowledge if it doesn't step off the page into your life? In life there are wild pearls and there are farmed pearls. The difference between the two is the same difference between you being given knowledge by another and you finding it out for yourself. You have to be the pearl diver and use your imagination to work out how this wisdom can best be applied in your life. The Pearl is only for those who are willing to risk their lives for something greater

A pearl oyster, invaded by an irritant it can't expel, turns adversity into a glowing iridescent work of nature's art. This shining treasure you now hold in your hands celebrates the similar path shared by women. In Path of the Pearl, Mary Olsen Kelly invites us to assess our own life's journey using the same six criteria used by jewelers for grading pearls - shape, size, color, luster, orient, and perfection. Her reflections and insights offer a new way of recognizing and embracing our whole self, complete with imperfections, and rejoicing in the hard-earned treasures obtained by overcoming adversity.

It is the end of the nineteenth century and China is riding on the crest of great change, but for nine-year-old Willow, the only child of a destitute family in the small southern town of Chin-kiang, nothing ever seems to change. Until the day she meets Pearl, the eldest daughter of a zealous American missionary. Pearl is head-strong, independent and fiercely intelligent, and will grow up to be Pearl S Buck, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning writer and humanitarian activist, but for now all Willow knows is that she has never met anyone like her in all her life. From the start the two are thick as thieves, but when the Boxer Rebellion rocks the nation, Pearl's family is forced to leave China to flee religious persecution. As the twentieth century unfolds in all its turmoil, through right-wing military coups and Mao's Red Revolution, through bad marriages and broken dreams, the two girls cling to their lifelong friendship across the sea. In this ambitious and moving new novel, Anchee Min, acclaimed author of Empress Orchid and Red Azalea, brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who loved the country of her childhood and who has been hailed in China as a modern heroine.

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.